A naturist’s view on the fashion industry

Fashion. Worse than you might know.

Let me tell you something. Second to oil, fashion and textiles is the most polluting industry in the world. Did you know that? I didn’t. I read about it here. I don’t know if you headed over to read the article. Here’s a summary of the facts:

It can take more than 20,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of cotton.

Up to 8,000 different chemicals are used to turn raw materials into clothes.

The clothing that doesn’t sell, falls apart or goes out of style usually ends up on landfills.

Wow. Impressive, isn’t it? According to classiccotton.org 3/4 of all produced clothes end up on landfills. Now that is scary.

Naturism, a.k.a. common sense.

After these figures it’s even more evident that people who prefer nudity are on the smart side of the scale. I hope that all the clothes we don’t buy make a difference. Less water wasted, fewer chemicals all over the place, and less garbage and waste.

Of course there will always be garbage, but I almost fell out of my chair when I read how much junk is created by the manufacturing of clothes. But… did you see the number of chemicals used? Up to eight thousand! And that is used on stuff everyone happily puts on their skin. I’m convinced most of that stuff will be washed out with 20,000 litres (that is almost 5,200 gallons, for non-litre people) of water per kilo / 2 lbs. but still. All that stuff has to go somewhere. Do you trust the fashion industry enough to make sure that any remaining chemical is caught and discarded in a responsible manner? I wouldn’t put my money on that.

After digging into all this matter I am even more inclined not to wear clothes as much as I can. We hear about pollution and such every day, but the fashion industry is a market that goes on doing that without anyone batting an eye at it. If we talk about dirty secrets: new clothes have them!

5 thoughts on “A naturist’s view on the fashion industry”

And it’s not just that the clothes end up in landfills and that manufacture takes a lot of resources, but as ever more clothes are produces in far off places the transport of those clothes (most of which get thrown away without ever being worn, whether bought or not) is extremely expensive in terms of energy requirements.

While for the US and Canada a lot of the manufacturing takes place in (relatively) nearby Mexico, for Europe most of it comes from places like Vietnam and Cambodia, literally half the world away.
And those countries don’t themselves produce the cotton and other materials needed in any quantity, that gets shipped to them from Europe and central Asia.